This invention relates in general to electronic program guides for television (TV) receivers. More particularly, the present invention relates to a specially designed electronic TV program guide having improved flexibility, versatility, and cost savings over known electronic TV program guides.
A typical electronic TV program guide is a database of programming information encoded into the video signals broadcast over a satellite, cable or broadcast TV system. The database is decoded from the received video signals, then stored in the satellite receiver, cable TV decoder, the TV receiver itself, or other similar such unit. The electronic program guide information may be viewed and/or searched by displaying the guide on the TV screen upon demand. In comparison with printed TV program guides, electronic guides offer larger capacity, electronic searching, last-minute updates, and other features that are not practical with printed paper guides.
However, because of the large number of stations available on satellite and cable TV systems, the memory and processing requirements for electronically storing and searching through the potentially enormous amounts of program information available for satellite and cable services can prohibit a cost-effective and simple implementation of an electronic TV program guide. Others have attempted to reduce the memory and processing burdens associated with electronic TV program guides. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,038,211 issued to Hallenbeck discloses an online TV program information system that stores from a broadcast datastream only program information that meets selection criteria determined by the user. However, the Hallenbeck system calls for the user to program several potentially long and involved selection criteria. As illustrated in FIG. 1 of the Hallenbeck patent, the selection criteria 17 may include a service list 17a, types of programming list 17b, times of listings 17c, and other criteria 17d.
Thus, there is still a need for a TV receiver that stores an electronic TV program guide according to selection criteria determined by the user, wherein the selection criteria and method of storing and updating the program information provide improved flexibility, versatility, and cost savings over known methods of receiving and storing electronic TV program guides.